


Bonded

by Anonymous



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Cunnilingus, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Massage, Smut, Soulmates, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:22:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29680437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “What even are we?” he asks, unbidden.She chuckles, shrugging. “Well, you always know what I need, what I feel and yet sometimes, in the early days anyway, not so much anymore, it was like you cursed my name. Were you afraid?”“Who wouldn’t I be? It’s frightening to know someone can know everything about you, know everything your feeling.”“Not everything.”“Merrill…”He speaks her name so softly. “Fenris. Treat me like a lover.”
Relationships: Fenris/Merrill (Dragon Age)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5
Collections: Nobody Expects the Dragon Age Smutquisition





	Bonded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sneaky-Apostate (Sneaky_Apostate)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sneaky_Apostate/gifts).



> Hope you enjoy!

Merrill doesn’t usually take the walk from Lowtown to Hightown alone. She wishes the ball of twine Varric gave her all those years ago was long enough to make the journey so can find her way back later, but if worst comes to worse Hawke can let her stay at the mansion. At least it’s somewhat nearby her destination. Maybe Hawke will even let her swing from the chandelier. She’s always wanted to.

The thought doesn’t make her as giddy as it once did. She’s disquieted, anxious.

It’s Fenris.

It’s always him, isn’t it? He promotes annoyances, or so Hawke says. Merrill wouldn’t call it annoyances—though he does say certain things sometimes, mostly of magic. No, her true vex with Fenris, even as he makes her stomach fill with butterflies is he won’t admit it. He won’t say yes like she’s been saying yes this whole time she’s known him, even if she doesn’t say it out loud but inwardly. Well, perhaps she can’t be mad and expect him to know too, but then again perhaps she can indeed be mad. She’s heard of this before, knows it well. They call it bonding. She dares to think it’s them.

She’s only been to Fenris’ house a few times. She’s also only been to his house with Hawke. When she knocks on the crusty and old door, she twiddles her thumbs as she waits. Once Fenris told Varric he danced throughout the house choreographing routines. She hopes she’s not interrupting one such routine. Varric may have said it was a jest, but Merrill would like to think Fenris wouldn’t mind to break out into a jig every once in a while. It’s easier to imagine him dancing than being always alone in his too large mansion.

No answer. She waits. She knocks again. Still no answer. It is a big mansion. Perhaps he didn’t hear. She’s too imaginative, they knew that back then and perhaps it was part of the reason why they shunned her along with everything else. She still can’t help but wonder if something happened to him. He could have hit his head and fallen. He could have tripped. It’s a big home and it is falling apart according to Aveline. Falling masonry could have struck him.

Her hand on the door’s handle, thinking, thinking, she decides to go in.

She thanks the Creators she finds him easily enough. So many rooms she could spend hours searching, but he’s meditative by the fire on the floor, staring at the embers as he toys with a bottle of wine. At the Hanged Man whenever Hawke tries to goad Fenris into a drink he usually refuses. He’s not averse to drinking, clearly, but Fenris acts on his own terms. He and Hawke may be “friends,” in the barest sense of the word, and perhaps he could have moved on, but thankfulness still plants him in Kirkwall. As for Fenris and herself, she knows the truth. He’s been wary of her since the first, because she is a mage and one who dabbles in forgotten magics. He’s also wary of her for reasons beyond their pasts. Perhaps she’s been afraid too and that is why the clean, warm and pleasant burn that’s ignited in her since they’ve met has gone unspoken.

He used to tell her to stay away from him and that was when she knew the burn that existed in her since the day she met him existed in him too. Yet time passed—and you don’t survive several battles with someone without being at least a little fond of them. It was slow and all at once, her and him speaking through quiet murmurs and soft touches here and there. He was with her when Hawke took her back to Sundermount so she could speak to the Keeper. He smiled at her on the way out when all she wanted to do was crawl back to her home and make a kettle of tea, took her hand too and squeezed. He felt good and warm. He had those puppy eyes too. Nothing happened that day, everything still went unsaid. Yet so long as they existed as they were, the fire between was warm and calm, even if he told her she shouldn’t mettle or dare. He said Hawke was a fool for giving her the arulin'holm.

It’s fine. She’s used to it. So long as he feels it too, the pull, they can exist and kindle their fires. She would say that’s all she wants from him, but she can’t when she’s knows there’s more. If indeed it is true. It may not be.

Maybe that’s why she came to him. She needs to know.

Well, she also does want to check on him. She hasn't seen him since what happened at the Hanged Man with his siter.

“I thought you’d be here.”

He speaks without looking up at her, holding his bottle. “Then why didn’t you say hello?” she asks, plopping down on his dusty sofa. Fenris sleeps on blankets in the living room in a makeshift bed near the fire, and Merrill dips her feet between them to warm them from her walk. She was left with nipped fingers and toes but she hardly noticed on the walk, her heart pattered so. Fenris takes another sip of wine before he wordlessly hands the bottle. They sip from the same bottle, the wine fruity and sweet and not something Hawke would think Fenris would drink. Merrill knows better. There’s a beating of a heart underneath the broody stare. There’s even sometimes puppy eyes from him, though Hawke or Varric usually can’t see when there are. Merrill can.

Fenris doesn’t answer her question, and she points out that he could have been hurt in this big house of his.

“I wasn’t,” he says, resigned. “I’m fine.”

“You know you can’t fool me.”

Whatever secrets he can keep from Hawke he can’t keep from her. Even he knows it. They can speak without words, they can share looks and they both know what each other mean and it hasn’t taken either them aback as it used to when they first met. They speak a language only they understand. They make their own rules.

She moves next to him from the sofa to the blankets next to him by the fire. “I know you’re hurting after what happened in the Hanged Man.”

He silent, watching the dancing embers. She asks what he’ll do now, as it seems like he can do whatever he would want.

“Can’t I?” He scoffs. “I’m an elf from Tevinter squatting in a dilapidated mansion. This freedom tastes like ashes.”

“Is that why you’re sad? It’s not what you thought it would be?” Merrill thought once she could understand freedom. Now she’s not so sure. Maybe in addition to everything else, it’s also a state of mind.

She may feel Fenris’ disquiet like she always can, but some things are his own, just as some are her own. Sometimes she wishes it weren’t so, that perhaps they could just merely hold each other, press their foreheads together and feel. They’ve lived like this for a long time though, silently knowing. Maybe they’re both afraid if they take that fall they won’t be able to get back up

There was no fall, she realizes. There just a was and an is. Just as it is with the bonded…

“I’m not sad,” Fenris says, smoothing his white hair away from his face.

“Confused maybe?”

He shrugs. “Perhaps.”

“How about a massage?”

Isabela has said they relieve tension, and Fenris certainly has it from carrying around a big sword. He however looks as though he’s about to protest as she plops back up on the sofa behind him. He doesn’t, yet still she decides to wait before touching him. He prompts her with a soft, slightly prodding “well?” Chuckling, she begins to knead his shoulders. He sighs even, settling between her legs. She’s careful not to poke her fingers against his spikey armor as he ends up further against her. He’s lithe with hard sinews, graceful and refined strength. She’d love to watch him in battle more—would if she could without imminent death— but sometimes catches glances in frays. He strikes like a graceful dancer even as battle compels fierceness and fire. She’s thinking of it then, thinking only of him and their joined fires, so when he asks if she has heard from her clan, it surprises.

“It’s the same,” she says. “It’ll always be the same.”

“Not going to try to talk to them again?”

“And say what?” She sighs, stopping. “They never listened before. No one ever listens.”

“Merill—”

He angles his head, glancing at her with furrowed brows. He thinks he’s the exception. She can see it in his puppy eyes even if he remains not mentioning what binds them, but what would you say of the person that can read your eyes, your thoughts and your small wildfire? What does it matter that perhaps he already knows? Isn’t asking what’s important?

“I could listen,” he says, gentle. Sweet.

“You never did before. Well, sometimes. Mostly you brood.”

She hopes she’s not so cruel as he rubs at his temples. “That’s because…”

When he trails off, not finding the right words, she crosses her arms. “Sometimes you know about it and you aren’t afraid,” she says, “even if you don’t talk about it. But sometimes you ignore it and pretend like I don’t exist or your frightened of me.”

“You are not frightening.”

“I can be if you looked hard enough.”

“I do. I’m never frightened.”

 _Then why don’t you say anything,_ she wants to demand, though it doesn’t matter. “I came here for you,” she says, massaging his shoulders some more, much more aggressively this time, pouring her strength into it.

“Did you? I want to listen to you.”

She squeezes his shoulders all the more tightly. “Fenris…”

“Come here.”

He motions for her to sit directly in front of him. Brows furrowing, she ends up where he asks, not sure what to expect. She gasps when she feels his hands on her shoulders, and he stops when he hears, thinking she doesn’t like it.

“No,’ she protests, “go on. I just…didn’t expect that.”

She must have had tension. Varric does tell her about it a lot. So does Hawke. Sitting in front of the Eluvian all day can’t be good for her as they say, though she doesn’t really care what they say. Fenris doesn’t say anything, just kneads and presses, massages, and tells her she can talk if she wants, even if he already knows what’s bothering her.

“And what is bothering me?” she asks. “You think your clever now?”

“Perhaps.”

She bites back a surprised, yet not entirely undelighted moan as he presses and makes circles against her shoulders, the motion sharp yet soothing, sending little jolts of electricity through her. Yet she freezes when he moves closer, still massaging and pressing, his breath against her ear.

“You’re not alone.”

She knew this would happen. It’s what would have always happened. It was their path since they met. Isn’t that what has been building up inside of them?

Isn’t that why she came?

Yet it makes her quiver, even as she says, “neither are you.”

“Are you sure?”

“I did come here.”

“I knew you would.” His lips barely graze the tip of her ear. “It was just a matter of waiting.”

Her heart patters. “And now that the waiting is done?”

To just be. They can simply just be. Be together, be apart, but she thinks from his gentle touches he wants them to be together. There’s an ease that ebbs and flows from him, a quiet she hasn’t felt in a while. She wonders if he can feel her quiet.

With him so close, she isn’t too quiet anymore.

She gulps, his hand caressing against her back. “I—"

“Yes.”

Yes he says. He’s acknowledging it, that she’s not the only one feeling something. (Though she already may have known he knew. Still, it’s nice to hear.) She considers asking him again to tell her it is indeed her who he wants, but something else is happening, centered in her lips and some fiery part of her core she knows exists but hasn’t really given too much thought to before, other than the wildfire only burns for Fenris. Her lips burn and ache with want, the need to know what it’s like to kiss him.

Merrill leaning against his back, feeling that part of him too, stiff against her, their lips find each other.

She moans as her lips meld to his. His fingers thread through her hair and his lips move to her neck, gentle and beckoning. She wants those lips everywhere. Whatever fire sparked when she first met Fenris fans and blooms and alights.

“You’re not alone,” he promises her.

“Not since we’ve met.”

 _Acknowledge it for good,_ she says. _Acknowledge that this pull and fire I’ve felt since I’ve met you is something you know too, even alone with everything else. Please, please, please._

He does. “I know it. I know. I won’t run.”

His kisses were answer enough, loud and clear. “I’ve never worried.”

Her back pressed against his front he touches everywhere he can, Merrill wiggling her hips against him, wanting it, waiting, and yet he stills her with his hands, asks her to “settle down.”

“Why?”

“Don’t whine.”

“I am not.”

He chuckles. “No. But still. Here.”

He tugs at her clothes. He’s restraining himself and she knows it. He could tug them off more forcibly, but he waits for permission. She nods against him and helps him slide them off, her shirt following. She’s naked against his armored body in front of the fire. The flames dance and burn brighter, all her magic. It coils and ebbs as his tattooed hands touch her body with the care of someone new to touching as they are. His hands wander with little aim other than to feel, breathe and be. Until—

Her legs part. It’s her hint. His fingers skim past the coarse hair at her center. His fingers are gentle against her inner thighs, and she tells him exactly where she wants those nimble fingers by taking his hand and moving it right _there,_ though she imagines he could have figured it out for himself if she let him. The truth is she’s impatient. She’s unlocked her wanting and yearning and lusting and it’s unleashed and even perhaps ruthless.

The burning want starkly contrasts their momentary softness. Indeed, Fenris is soft at first, but her moans and cries compel and lead him on. She strains against him as he fingers increase their pace, feels his beating heart and hardness behind her as he makes the frissons grow and grow, and _yes, yes, yes…_

It stops. She overfills, not bothering to try to deny, letting herself feel and cry out. She’s flooded with warmth, happy and blissful. She reels and swims and floats and flies until he kisses her wildly as the flames that continue to dance in the fire. Somewhere between kisses she figures if she’s naked he may as well be too. She turns, attempting to pull off his armor. It’s a complicated mess however, and she doesn’t know where things buckle and unbuckle. Taking pity on her frustrations, he chuckles and helps her. He makes quick work of it, Merrill in the process moving closer to the dancing fire and laying down with her feet planted on the ground. She opens herself a little, smirking at her ability to strike desire.

He doesn’t have her wait long. Bridging the space he hovers her, one of her legs caught between his. His silver tattoos engrave his chest, arms, and even his legs, and they seem to glimmer in the firelight. Her hand gently traces a line down his chest. He says it hurt. He says the pain was unbearable when the ritual happened. He says it seared and left him bereft of memories. Can touches heal wounds and burns, even the memory of the pain? Has she given him a bevy of memories to make up for what was lost? She hopes so. She hopes her lovemaking can render him speechless and yearning for more. Her gaze travels downward without shame or reservation. She looks there too, because they are doing this and why not? He’s long. It makes her gulp.

He’s gazed at her as she has with him. He watches without touching, his mouth slightly parted.

“Don’t be afraid,” she says. “If you don’t want to…”

He smiles in answer, another answer is the drawing of a line from the hollow at the center of her throat down her body. _I feel it,_ she says. _I know. Since the day we meet…_

He joins their hands, throwing them over their heads. At first they observe how their bodies fit, relish the feel and press. They are skin against skin, fevered skin both baked in the heat of the fire and stained with different magics. He’s warm between her thighs, leaking, and she closes her eyes, committing each touch and kiss to memory, weaving each piece as a small mosaic within the larger mural or engraving of their first joining, the time they jumped into the water and stayed there for good. She shivers when he kisses she side of her neck but likes it better when his soft lips contrast with the gentle sharpness of his teeth and wet tongue against her pulse point. He kisses between her breasts but not her breasts, and the soft swell of her stomach. She thinks he’ll travel further, wants him to travel further, but he stops and lays beside her.

He looks at her as they lay side by side, something in the green eyes different from before. “Are you regretting it now?” she asks. She’s afraid of the answer but she must ask.

He shakes his head. “Do you hurt then?” she asks.

He shakes his head again. Merely he says, this is strange.

“It is,” she admits, grinning. But she knows what she wants. Judging by how she feels he’s feeling, and the look him, the lower parts of him, he wants it too.

“What even are we?” he asks, unbidden.

She chuckles, shrugging. “Well, you always know what I need, what I feel and yet sometimes, in the early days anyway, not so much anymore, it was like you cursed my name. Were you afraid?”

“Who wouldn’t I be? It’s frightening to know someone can know everything about you, know everything your feeling.”

“Not everything.”

“Merrill…”

He speaks her name so softly. “Fenris. Treat me like a lover.”

“How do lovers act?”

She props herself to her side, links her arms around him. She kisses him, the magic engrained in him a soft pool. Fire ignites. It’s the both of them combined.

“Like this,” Merrill says.

She hooks a leg over his, guides him inside. Her brows knot together as her walls accept his length, shallow at first before he pushes himself further inside with one slow thrust. They breath the same air as they move in tandem, his arms around her anchoring. His fingers drift where hers go too, right at her center toward her clit, and she stops drawing circles around that small bundle of nerves when his nimble fingers are more than enough, overwhelming if he let them be. He is overwhelming, so much of a force and yet graceful and would yield if she asks, but of course she never asks. For their first time she can handle his overwhelming. They’ve quelled and understood this is where they want to be, and at first he’s gentle even as he verges on too much. He makes her come softly, moves and juts his hips after as the soft waves of her climax ease. It’s a gentle rock, and she falls to her back wanting the fuller feel.

She doesn’t get that fuller feel at first. He pauses the gentle rock with his hands on either side of her, cock warm against her thigh. She realizes she gets to watch him from this angle. He’s somewhere between concentrating and lost, and when he grabs her hips, she puts her hands on his, guides his hands to travel across her body, her breasts. _Be greedy,_ she says. _I have all of me to give you._ On his knees with her hands against his, his thumbs brush against nipples and soft swell of her breasts, indiscriminately caressing and touching. He watches her, more mesmerized by her eyes and her growing smile than thinking of his own pleasure of being inside her again, though she does want him to feel good again…

“This is good,” Fenris says, reading her thoughts. “You are good.”

He slides on top of her, presses more of his weight on top of her to kiss and love on her body with his ardent mouth. Their eyes lock as he fills her again, the connection deep and all-consuming and still not overwhelming. She wraps her legs around him, deepens their connection still. A warm fill and fullness coupled with him on top ignites small fires all over their bodies, and for the first time, not because of their connection but because they have finally stopped running, there’s calm.

She could make love like this for hours as he alternates between kissing her lips and kissing her breasts, sometimes clasping their hands together while other times closing his eyes, resting his forehead on top of hers. He stops moving and she protests, but whatever curses or pleas she would have said disappear when his white head dips down. He licks at her arousal pooling and her small bundle of nerves. She can’t decide what’s better there, his fingers or his mouth, but the tip of his tongue drawing small circles as he slides a long finger inside her makes her thighs shake. He draws a soft, lulling end, her second of the night before he parts her legs, presses inside again. Fenris on his knees, her hands on his arms, he comes too before she can ask, before she says she wants to feel his bliss too. They taken both their own bliss and each other’s without reservation. Together, still joined by the fire, they remain.

She must have nodded off. The first thing she feels when she comes back from the fade is a warm towel between her legs. Fenris wipes away his traces before discarding the towel—a problem for later—and laying by her side. She doesn’t know what to say but she wants to say something, but luckily she’s not the first one to break the silence. “Have you heard what it means to be bonded?” He asks. When he saw Varania he recalled more from his past, but mostly stories. There was one book of history Hawke read to him that always seemed familiar. He read it again recently, and meeting Varania again must have jogged the memory. The book, he says, was about bonding.

“I do know of bonding,” Merrill says. “Our people say that some people are painted with the same star stuff.”

“Do you think that’s us?”

“I don’t know.” She smirks. “I always thought you had to be friends.”

“But we are friends, right?”

She considers. Lovers before friends, bonded before all. “You challenge me and you support me. You’re always there. I suppose we are friends.” She decides it must be true.

Don’t question, she says, nestling closer to him and resting her cheek on his pattering heart. They huddle for warmth next to the fire and he covers them with blankets before they think on it, this ebb and pull of their magics and star stuff. Too, they make love later into the night.

They came to touch one another at the same moment, gentle and searching touches before Merrill glides herself across him, straddling his thighs. He makes her come against his fingers in that gradual, lulling way that only his hands have managed and not even her own. Whatever urge he may have to bring her to her back and take control, he channels into gripping her hips, touching her anywhere he can reach. She can tell when he’s about to spill inside—he throws his head back and he grips tighter, and she leans down, blankets him with her body. She’s on top but she gives him control, lets him hold her as he comes with her heart beating in tandem next to his. Their second joining, gentle like the first. Still, she handles his overwhelming. It’s what she was built for.

“I’m sorry for whatever I have done or said before.”

She thinks she’ll take kisses as more apologies, but that’s for later. For now she says, “forgiven,’ because she too has faltered. She hasn’t followed what she always knew to be true, that he is her bonded.

Or perhaps only now they’re finally ready, that they won’t deny. That they’ll forgive.

“Whatever I may do. No matter what happens, this is right.”

He calls her his bonded before she kisses him once more. And for that night, and all nights after, she stays.


End file.
